If I have been correctly informed, Mr. Smith obtained by inheritance from his father and by purchase from his fellow-heirs (besides much other property) _seven hundred and fifty thousand acres of land_ lying in various parts of New York and of several other States. Erelong he became deeply impressed by a sense of his responsibility to God for the right use of such an immense portion of the earth’s surface,--the common heritage of man. He could not believe that it had been given him merely for his own gratification or aggrandizement. He received it as a trust committed to him for the benefit of others. He felt as a steward, who would have to give an account of the estate intrusted to his care. He contrasted his condition with that of others,--he the possessor of an amount of land which no one man could occupy and improve,--millions of his fellow-men, inhabitants of the same country, without a rood that they could call their own and fix upon it the humblest home. He profoundly pitied the landless, and earnestly set himself to consider the best way in which to bestow portions of his estate upon those who needed them most. The father of Mr. Smith, like most other gentlemen of his day in New York, was a slaveholder until many years after the Revolution. Gerrit was accustomed to slavery through his childhood, and until he was old enough to judge for himself of its essential and terrible iniquity. He has repeatedly assured me that, although the bondage of his father’s negroes was of the mildest type, he early saw that slaveholding was egregiously wrong, and sympathized deeply with the enslaved. He rejoiced when the law of the State, in 1827, prohibited utterly its continuance, and immediately felt that all that could be should be done to repair the injuries it had inflicted upon those who had been subjected to it. He longed for the entire, immediate abolition of the great iniquity throughout the land. He early joined the Colonization Society, believing that the tendency of the plan, as well as the intention of many of its Southern patrons, was to effect the subversion and overthrow of that gigantic system of wickedness. Notwithstanding the exposures of its duplicity made by Mr. Garrison and Judge William Jay, he retained his confidence in the Colonization Society, and contributed generously to its funds, until near the close of the year 1835. At that time, as I have stated heretofore, Mr. Smith became fully convinced that the Society was opposed to the emancipation of our enslaved countrymen, unless followed by their expatriation. Thereupon he paid three thousand dollars, the balance due on his subscription to its funds, and withdrew forever from the Colonization Society, to which he had contributed at least _ten thousand_ dollars.